Why I Do What I Do: The Purpose of Literacy Strategies

For those of you familiar with me and my work, you have no doubt been inundated with my beliefs about WHY literacy strategies are both important and urgent.  If you have not had the pleasure of being cornered by me in a hallway at HHS or stuck on an elevator, the following is a restatement of why I do, what I do, and to what end.

The purpose of literacy strategies are:

     *to enable students to engage fully and converse fluently with the concept's an author presents in written texts
     *to enable students to employ metacognitive strategies which help them to link new concepts to their previous understandings and thereby improve retention, application, and synthesis
     *to enable students to develop the skill set necessary to think both critically and divergently.